Musings: Real Love: Love and Fabrication

I. Lessons from my aunt Mary J. Blige

In 1992 my aunt Mary was searching for something. Real love. She was searching for a real love; someone to satisfy her every need.

Just a couple of years ago, a Cornell University issued a call for projects that explored the notion of fabrication and prompted me into thinking about this early 90’s conversation with my aunt. As I often do, I began questioning. What is real about love? What about love is real? Is love inherently a kind of fabricated narrative that a society regularly tells itself? If so, can true happiness be derived from it? What lies might we tell ourselves about the ones we love? What lies might we tell ourselves, about ourselves, when in love? In philosophy we are taught that “the real” tracks “the true”. In other words, the things that we call real are rooted in some truth about the world. If what we come to think of as “real” about love has roots in fabrications of various sorts, then our understanding of love is chimerical; the existence of real love should be doubted.

Philosophers, artists, poets, and many people that we meet in our daily encounters regularly ask, “Is love real?” and “What must it be like?” In the Symposium Plato situates questions about the nature and reality of love in the philosophical tradition. Yet, these considerations are also practical given who and how we love influences how we live, and how we live influences how and who we love.

Love is a risky and dangerous game. For many lovers, a primary achievement of romantic love involves establishing a kind of intimacy that is premised on a radical vulnerability. We open ourselves up to the beloved — yet, this simultaneously opens us up to the very scary possibility of being wounded by the very same hands that “feed us” so to speak. Thinking about the ways that we might be harmed by love usually revolve around mistreatment at the hand of the beloved. We do not take much time, however, to reflect on the ways that the stories we tell ourselves about love might have harmful consequences as well; they might impair our chances at epistemic well-being. That is, the tales we tell ourselves about love sometimes compromise our ability to formulate and/or recognize true beliefs about the world and the people in it.

II. Fabricated Lovers

Philosophers Diane Enns and Troy Jollimore have remarked on the degree to which love involves, in some sense, fabrications about those we love — i.e. “the beloved”. Each remarks on the fact that to some extent love involves viewing those we love in an exaggerated light.

The fabrications involve a process of what Enns calls beautification. This process can be read in two ways: one that idealizes and one that augments. Thinking out loudly about idealization she writes:

“[Love involves] idealization — when we idealize our lovers, we uphold the adage that love is blind… In the early throes of infatuation, all of our fantasies of perfect love are projected onto the lover. This is the madness of love, its fever. The lover incarnates perfection, and we remain willfully blind to flaws until we discover that the beloved is far from ideal. When the blinders fall away at the first encounter with the “real” person, we may fall out of love.”

For Enns’, then, under love’s sway we are first infatuated with and by the ones that we love. Although the focus my concentration here is romantic love, we might seriously ask whether the love parents have for their children mimics this kind of idealization — we are often infatuated with and by our children. In love, we are inclined to superimpose our ideas about love (which often have little or nothing at all to do with our actual beloveds) onto our relata. (Additionally, we should add here that some studies in psychology such as the work carried out by Judith Hall and Shelley Taylor, suggests that these idealizations of the beloved extend beyond the early infatuation stage of loving relationships but rather they persist throughout the duration of even long-term relationships).

Love is thus a bit perverse as it bolsters indifference. We ignore the flaws of the beloved while infatuated in love. The falsifications associated with love involves an indirect influence on a lover’s grasp of the facts.

Regarding augmentation, Enns is joined by Troy Jollimore, Irving Singer, and others who think that “There are elements of imagination, idealization, and even falsification and delusion in love.” Here, it is not the lover’s grasp of the facts that is straightforwardly in question, but one’s interpretation of them. Jollimore writes that when in love, “lovers are able to maintain their knowledge of the facts, but their love influences, perhaps obscures, their interpretation or evaluations of the facts.”

Loving in the dark is the image Enns uses to describe the risk and danger associated with love. The image is fitting given that Jollimore takes love to be a kind of “seeing” or “vision”. Contained to the dark rooms of our relational worlds we become susceptible to the elimination or suppression of true beliefs. These epistemic threats change the character of our other beliefs and can lead to the formation of beliefs that are straightforwardly false. For example, “refusal to acknowledge bad features about the beloved’s character”, (the proverbial “red flags” so to speak), “may lead one to form the false belief that one’s beloved has an excellent moral character or is morally better than most of the people around her.”

The threat is not only aimed at our psychological and epistemic well-being, but also at the ideal of love itself. We can better appreciate Los Angeles music artist YG’s philosophical question posed in the title of his 2014 song “Who do you love?”. If love augments how we see our lovers then the idea that it is our lovers that that we love is questionable. Instead, it makes more sense to say that we love the imagined qualities that we superimpose on to the beloved, rather than the beloved themselves.

We do not truly see the beloved. We, therefore, do not love the beloved so much as these imagined qualities. What we see and value is, in some sense or another, our own creations.

III. Fabricated Love

Although there is an interdependence between them, love’s fabrications extend beyond the psychological and the epistemic, to the social as well. Carrie Jenkins has pointed out that we learn the K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhyme early on in our socialization. Two relata sit in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love; then comes marriage; (hell finish it for me, yall know the rest).

As we are socialized, we learn that romantic love is monogamous, dyadic, exclusive, and in a normative sense, leads to marriage. (In the philosophy of love this is called amatonormatvity and mononormativity) We learn nothing of the 5 percent of persons who find love in non-monogamous relationships such as polyamory, for example. Instead, we perpetuate the view that those lovers are somehow “doing it wrong”.

I’d like to return for a second with the piece of art from which we began. Mary J. Blige laments that real love involves finding one person to satisfy our every need. Sadly, this ignores the more honest truth that even when we find ourselves in the most fulfilling of monogamous romantic relationships, we still have many of our needs met by our hobbies, jobs, friends, and other loved ones.

The idea that love is both mono- and amatonormative is sured up by romance films, novels, and a marriage industrial complex that present “real love” and a monogamous monolith with little exception. A primary reason that films like Director X’s Superfly or shows like Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It or HBO’s Trigonometry make such a large splash in mainstream discourses about love is that their deviance gets pronounced and exaggerated against these mono- and amatonormative backdrops. We are taught that love is about rule and number; yet non-monogamists teach us otherwise.

Social discourse around love fabricates more than mere tales about number. Some also have to do with reason and politics. For example, at the interpersonal level, some believe that love and reason are diametrically opposed to one another. “Love is irrational,” we say, in spite of compelling work by contemporary reason-responsive theorists that show the two working in tandem with one another. Others believe that love is an inextricably private matter, having little or nothing at all to do with justice or the public sphere, in spite of the fact governments regulate people’s “private” relationships through the institution of marriage.

The dissemination of these narratives are not without moral, social, and political consequences. In fact, they interact at various levels to create and sustain normative pressures and structures, having harmful impacts on individuals and societies alike. For example, heteronormativity and amatonormativity — the ideology that central, monogamous, romantic relationships aimed at marriage should be the ideal romantic relationship — intersect in morally problematic ways to denigrate various social groups who prefer singledom or non-monogamous lifestyles. These love styles have also been mobilized as major factors in court cases about citizenship, immigration law, child custody, and housing & workplace discrimination.

IV. Love, Lies, and Liberation

So what is the point of all of this? What of love? How might pointing out that love is fabricated improve our ways of loving?

Admittedly, the idea that “real love” doesnt exist reads a bit drab, pessimistic, and nihilistic. Yet perhaps love can be avenged from its fabrications. My aim here has not been to deny that there is a such thing as love. Instead I’ve tried to point out that the metaphysical promise of love embedded in the notion of “real love” or “true love” does not exist.

It is my hope that the insights contained here moves us further away from thinking about love in terms of its idealizations and closer to the pathway of a more humanistic way of thinking about and going about loving. Love is messy because it’s humans are. Understanding how love, if true on Enns and Jollimore’s views, distorts our grasp of the facts about the beloved shows how much unreal ideals can be responsible for complicating matters of the head and the heart. We learn that our ideals about love, as aspirational and inspiring as they might sometimes be, are actually barriers to be overcome in the experience of a fully humanistic love for others and our romantic partner(s).

I have leaned in to the acceptance that my take on love and its ideals make me a nihilistic pessimist to the foolhardiest lovers amongst us; and that’s okay. We must be unwavering in our pursuit of truth even if it comes at an expense to popularity (dare I say, especially if it comes at an expense to popularity). What’s left, I hope, is a kind of liberation — one that frees us from ourselves in the service of loving others.